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Mulching as spiritual practice

Mulching is a garden chore. Although it provides a great benefit to the plants by keeping roots cool, suppressing weeds, stabilizing soil moisture and temperature, and generally making things tidy, I cannot deny that it’s not nearly as sexy a task as, say, installing new perennials from the nursery.

But in gardening as in life, pedestrian tasks outnumber the exciting ones by a wide margin. One secret to having a beautiful garden is to carve out regular time to maintain things. A second secret is to make peace with having to do those maintenance tasks. Whether you prefer to perform maintenance tasks once a week in a morning-long go, or choose instead to take 10 minutes every evening after dinner, glass of wine in hand, to tidy up one planting bed, finding what works for you and practicing it is what achieves the objective in the long term.

Changing an attitude about a chore is a practice, as surely as with yoga or perfecting a jump shot or mastering an instrument. I am practicing making my peace with weeding and mulching. I have a great deal of material on which to practice.

I’m trying to change my relationship with mulching and weeding by practicing mindfulness. Borrowing from yoga, I begin this journey with setting my intention:

I will weed and mulch for 30 minutes.

I will not weed without mulching, because disturbing the earth, even in weeding, brings new weed seeds to the surface. Without mulch, they will germinate in the daylight, bringing me fresh weeds and fresh aggravation.

I will focus only on my breathing, my weeding, and the sounds around me.

I fill a five-gallon bucket with mulch. In my other hand, I have a 2-gallon bucket and my garden knife. Sinking to my knees (must remember the foam kneeling pad!), I pull gently but firmly on the cluster of stems.

The earth, softened by heavy downpours from the recent storms, yields the bulb and all its top growth. I drop it into the 2-gallon bucket.

It’s quiet. Even though it is the time of day when people come home from work, I don’t hear the sounds of cars and commuters.

If the clump of Oxalis doesn’t move easily, I pry under it with the tip of my garden knife to bring up the bulb. The 2-gallon bucket now holds a half-gallon of weeds. I spread the mulch, tucking it close around the stems of newly emerged plants.

The humidity feels like a soft cotton blanket on my skin–enough to know it’s there, enough to make me feel like I am home, not so much that the air feels soupy. It’s perfect.

I hear children down the street, shouting. Are they whacking trees with sticks?

I move slowly and deliberately. When I feel myself speeding up, or thinking of my list of to-dos, I breathe and turn my focus back to the weeding and the sounds around me.

6 thoughts on “Mulching as spiritual practice”

I mulch in early spring, before the plants fully leaf out, applying a mixture of compost, bagged manure, alfalfa pellets, lime, kelp meal, bone meal and a bit of slow-release fertilizer. I got the idea from a book by Ann Lovejoy; she called these “feeding mulches.” With my sandy, rooty soil (Norway maples), I figure I need to add supplements.

I love the idea of feeding mulches. I may try these in a few of my beds next spring, in the ones where I’m not trying to encourage self-seeding annuals. Ann Lovejoy is a wonderful author and gardener. Thanks for this idea.

Reblogged this on Audrey Driscoll's Blog and commented:
It’s interesting to see another gardener finding (or creating) opportunities for mindfulness while doing garden tasks such as weeding and mulching. This chimes well with my recent post on weeding as meditation.

This is a lovely meditation on how to enjoy gardening, all aspects bring peace with the right attitude. I was actually given Oxalis and enjoyed it for years in my shady garden at my previous home. A friend who visited was horrified to see it growing this way and when I moved I decided to leave it behind. So glad now as other well-behaved things at that garden are completely out of control in my current location, like spiderwort and daylilies.